It’s Bill of Rights Day: Celebrate Our Movement!

To celebrate Bill of Rights Day today, I’d like to reflect on our tremendous legacy from the days we called ourselves the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and the groundbreaking work the organization did (long before I came onto the scene).

I love the way Nat Hentoff wrote about BORDC in the Village Voice. He referred to our founding mother, Nancy Talanian, as a modern-day Paul Revere. He compared the “teachers, retirees, lawyers, doctors, students, and nurses” who came together to launch the Bill of Rights Defense Committee in Northampton, Massachusetts in 2001 to the Sons of Liberty. He contrasted their courage with the cowardice of a Congress that rushed to pass the PATRIOT Act and strip us of our liberty. And when Northampton passed the first-in-the-nation resolution to defend the Bill of Rights in 2002, Hentoff called it “a new American Revolution.”

Maybe not a revolution. But we did help build a movement to defend our rights.

There is still so much work to be done, and the outlook may seem particularly dark right now, but, as Nat Hentoff pointed out, “all through our history, dissent and resistance have beaten back the darkness.”

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As Executive Director of Defending Rights & Dissent, Udry leads the organization’s advocacy and public education efforts to protect and strengthen civil society and challenge government abuse of First and Fourth Amendment rights. She represents DRAD in the media, in numerous coalitions, and on several boards of directors.
Prior to coming to DRAD, Udry was the legislative coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of over 1,600 groups working to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While living in Chicago, Udry served as the Executive Director of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, and as an organizer for the Coalition for New Priorities, and organized child care workers for the Day Care Action Council of Illinois. She currently serves on the board of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, and the DC chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and the DC-NLG Litigation Fund, as well as the Advisory Board of the Charity and Security Network. She is a co-founder of the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition.

State & local leaders must reject the militarization of our streets - even if it takes dusting off the Third Amendment to protect our rights enshrined in the First. https://rightsanddissent.org/news/no-one-expects-the-third-amendment/